Three Departments Working Together for Cold Chain Success

How do you go about integrating your cold chain and what is involved? To fully integrate your cold chain there are three (3) departments that need to be working together:

• Package Engineering
• Transportation / Distribution
• Product development

Start with the end in mind. Transport validation. Answer the question “What will it take to validate transport”? Look at transport validation just like you would validating a filling line. Treat transportation as an extension of manufacturing. Once you know what the end should look like the key is to not get overwhelmed and try to do everything at once.

Start easy; develop a smart, platforms based packaging qualification program that includes primary, secondary, devices, and cold chain shippers. From there move on to supporting your packaging qualification program by integrating your transport and distribution processes. Develop systems and processes, which provide control over the process and feedback/metrics of your transport environment, “close the loop”.

Finally take on the toughest of them all. Integrate product development into the entire process. While this may be the toughest it will have largest positive impact on your company’s operations. Integrating your product development into your cold chain or controlled environment logistics network will do many things such as:

• Increase speed to market by removing transport validation off the critical path.
• Perform multi-modal transport simulation studies and know that your product formulation is optimized for the transport environment
• Develop a stability program which not only meets regulatory requirements, but also takes into account the realities of the cold chain transport
• Reduce packaging development costs.